Coronavirus

Jackson Among Several Counties in Northeast Alabama Seeing Spike in New COVID-19 Cases

Coronavirus. Source: CDC.

There have been sharp increases in new COVID-19 cases over the past few weeks in Alabama, but the biggest spread of the virus is currently concentrated along the northern tier of counties — particularly in Jackson County, nestled in the northeast corner of the state.

Data from the Alabama Department of Public Health issued Monday shows that Jackson County led the state in new cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The county of 51,736 residents had a seven-day average of 73.9 new cases per day. Multiplying out those numbers to fit the standard measurement for cases gives the county a rate of 173 cases per 100,000 population.

It is one of six counties in Alabama to measure more than 100 in this statistic, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

As the state and the nation see COVID-19 numbers climb higher and higher, northeast Alabama is experiencing an outbreak of its own.

Four northeast counties — Jackson, Marshall, Morgan and Etowah — plus Colbert County in the northwestern part of the state and Fayette County in west central Alabama recorded seven-day averages that equate to 100 cases or more per 100,000 residents. Moving southward, there’s another strip of six counties with averages between 80 and 100 new daily cases per 100,000 residents. That group includes Jefferson, Blount and Walker counties.

Even more noteworthy is the rapidity with which this rate is increasing. In Jackson County, 625 new cases were reported in the week ending Monday, compared to 366 the week before. When adjusted for population, Jackson County had an increase per 100,000 residents of 589 cases in the past week, which put the county and the city of Scottsboro third in a Times list of metro areas where the coronavirus caseload is rising the fastest. It’s a list that the county topped on Dec. 5.

Three other metro areas also were among the 20 highest: Gadsden, in Etowah County, was seventh; Albertville, in Marshall County, was 14th; and the Anniston-Oxford area, in Calhoun County, was 19th.

In the past 14 days, Jackson County recorded a total of 1,040 new cases; adjusted for population, that’s 2,010.2 cases per 100,000, the highest by far in Alabama over the period.

Marshall County tallied 1,426.5 per 100,000, Etowah County had 1,357.1 and Fayette County 1,290.1. Nine of the state’s 67 counties had population-adjusted case counts of more than 1,000 over the past two weeks. Jefferson County wasn’t far from that level, with 957.5 positives per 100,000 residents, for a raw total of 6,313 cases.

Pressuring Health Care

The surge is straining the northern Alabama region’s largest health care provider, Huntsville Hospital Health System, which operates facilities in Huntsville plus seven other counties in northern Alabama and southern Tennessee. The system had to suspend many elective surgeries at its flagship hospital and others in Boaz and Guntersville, both of which are in Marshall County.

In the most recent numbers that the system has made public, from Dec. 4, there were 335 inpatients suffering from COVID-19 in the system, more than double the total from a month before and a record high for the system. UAB Hospital reported 130 COVID-19 patients Monday morning.

A look at maps shows that the coronavirus does not respect political boundaries. Every southern Tennessee county that borders Alabama also is reporting high rates of increase per capita, with six counties in Tennessee reporting a 7-day average of more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents as of Monday.

On a nationwide level, the areas experiencing the highest caseloads per capita are mostly in the Midwest and the northern end of the Appalachian Mountain range, such as western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Numerous rural counties in the northern Great Plains show up as hotspots on the New York Times’ national map, but many of those have large fluctuations in per-capita data because the counties are sparsely populated, and just a handful of cases over a day or two may cause an abnormal uptick.

There’s another statistic showing that testing in high-risk counties may be lacking, as well, which could mean there are more undiagnosed COVID-19 cases yet to be reported. According to the ADPH, Jackson and Marshall counties both show positivity rates — the percentage of all tests given that return positive results — higher than 50%. Marion and Fayette counties in west Alabama and Coosa County in the east central area also top that percentage. Those figures mean that more than half of all people tested in those counties in the previous 14 days were found to be positive for the coronavirus. Blount County is just under the 50% mark, along with Lamar, Morgan, Winston and DeKalb counties.

Northern Alabama’s numbers are increasing “at an alarming rate,” Huntsville Hospital Health System CEO David Spillers said in a press conference last week.

Spillers also said he’s worried that cases will rise because of Thanksgiving, and that could roll right into the Christmas holidays, when still more family gatherings and other activities with close contact will take place. “Short story is that we’re expecting this surge to last for a while,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t, but every indicator is that it will.”

Why the northeast region of Alabama is suffering from higher COVID-19 caseloads is still unclear. The farther south one travels in the state, the more the per-capita numbers drop. Two counties on either side of the state, Choctaw County in the Black Belt and Barbour County on the eastern border, have 7-day averages of less than 10 daily cases per 100,000.